anyway they have promised that it won't f2p but subscription is no good these days if you want to make profits. I really like this change, also their Cash shop seemed cleared and their ViP tickets are purchasable also in game. This part reminds FLEX and officially means that they will sell gold xD

Not to mention the ridicularity of launching events, which are world changing and part of the main story evolution, and not allow new and returning players to play them.... Don't this guys know how to program a simple phasing system? Are they that weak?

Is there any other game out there that completely leaves behind world changing events and not allow players to ever again see what happened?

I talk about this because Living Story Season 1 is completely left for dead. Not even paying (which is ridiculous) one can play it.

Warcraft has phasing, Elder Scrolls also, is there any other game out there that locks all the new player and returning ones in regard to what happened in the game story wise?

you paid anything for season1 ? no demands the game dollars for season2 ? whats your problem then ?

man its obvious you live only to hate! GW2 is not for you better step away and someone please lock this stupid hatred thread !

Like the title says, this is ridiculous. Is this their idea of calling players back?

I bought the box, and stopped playing a month after simply because the game had many problems in that time. Now, after seeing that a new Xpansion is arriving I decided to reinstall and retry the game, only to see that I have to pay to play...

one of the worst Op i have ever seen in my email newsletter from mmorpg.com ...

seriously ? man you rant for this ? they were free and still they are cause you can convert gold into gems and buy them through this ... please lock this thread someone !!!

"The core philosophy is that each dimensional map will be structured for depth of experience rather than expansion of the land mass."

Could someone explain this please? My first thought is small maps. Small maps that maybe you play more than once with different stuff?

edit- I was thinking too much "Rather than a more traditional strategy of rapidly expanding land mass with limited content to fill it, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns will focus less on total land mass in the expansion and will instead focus on depth of content within that gameplay space. Each map will be rich in content, rich in 3-D play space, and very deep in replay value to ultimately provide more gameplay value to our players and not leave an empty wasteland of rarely played content behind."

Smaller maps with more stuff, because big maps are bad

You're thinking about it too much in black & white terms.

What they mean is that instead of essentially a flat map with a sky dome, they are actually going to be using that 3rd dimension a lot more. Most games really don't when it comes to general map usage. Sure there are hills and such, but essentially everything is spread horizontally. In HoT they will be stacking layered content.

A pretext to this would be the jumping puzzle you see in Silverwastes. It's just a jumping puzzle, but it takes you both underneath the entire zone, but also up above the entire zone at the same time. Most people focus solely on what exists on ground level, but the map actually has fairly large areas (both below and above ground) that are basically unused aside from the jumping puzzle and a few small events. HoT sounds like they will be expanding on this a lot more.

For example, think of events happening both above you and below you, as you're questing around your zone. That's what they mean.

They zones aren't going to be any smaller than what they've already done. Horizontally they probably won't be any bigger either, but they will have a pretty substantial vertical component to them.

you are right both but ArenaNet has an issue with big maps and playerspace, they leave nothing for players. In GuildWar's 2 maps there is no free space if they could they could add content in every pixel. So players miss the space to "breath". This is good and bad but anyway it is a casual themepark and what it does it does it right, in my opinion .

"MO: I do want to be clear, we are not being coy today, we're not saying, “Oh, here's a tease of Heart of Thorns, but there are other things.” Our players were very patient waiting for today, and we announced every major feature of Heart of Thorns today."

this means no dungeons, no home instances, etc

if by home instances you mean housing then the game has them since launch, they just need to let us customize them to our liking. It does kind of suck that they didnt work on that for this expansion.

yeap this i mean . The only they added are some gather nodes and a mission for a Christmas tree ...

the only reason i was interested in Everquest are it's voxel engine and the Storybricks team. The rest of everything around Everquest sounds crappy, mostly the publisher who affects the development too much.. I see the whole staff with extreme cautious .. So far the Landmark was interesting but the execution horrible ...

Those who didn't like GW2 after the first month of its release they will still hate it.

The combat is the same, the story will be similar with the living story. It will remain a casual game.

This which will change is that they will add a specialization (one per class) and one whole class (which will have references to GW2 lore).

The mastery system will be similar to the existing WvW system (they already admitted this) which is not bad, and it will be good to have a unified system all around. The new maps will be a larger scale of the already new map of LivingStory. The WvW new map will be a borderland edition with mechanics from the existing EotM (edge of the mists).

Actually i believe that mechanics we saw last year around and there (EotM, rise of Teq., vertical maps, etc) we will pay for them into a larger scale.

These which are new are the glides, guild halls, strongholds(which we dunno if it will be something Smite or the old GvG, at least it will come with team ranking).

Anyway in the next 2 months we will get more details and at PX East we will see what they mean . For the moment i am skeptical optimistic about these changes and Anet's promises.

well the good part was that we get the feel they work fast. At next PAX we will see playable demo and then at Rezzed in Europe.

and the bad part is this:

"MO: I do want to be clear, we are not being coy today, we're not saying, “Oh, here's a tease of Heart of Thorns, but there are other things.” Our players were very patient waiting for today, and we announced every major feature of Heart of Thorns today."